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Monday
Jan262009

Creatures Interview

Douglas Rushkoff
Interviewed by Francis Leach
June 1998

Tonight on the programme, a very special guest, author Douglas Rushkoff, the man who about a decade ago hollered to the world that there was a fantastic new and exciting means of communicating with other people called the Internet. And of course since then it's become a global phenomena, a global obsession.




Can you tell us the first time you actually came in contact with net technology?

I was in San Francisco, and I was just going to begin a book on rave culture, a non fiction book. And it was about rave and some of the weird scientific things that went along with it. There were these people like Terence McKenna and Rupert Sheldrake who had you know bizarre scientific ideas that sort of tied in with this group organism, dancing beast that we were trying to develop. And I was staying at a friend's house, trying to get in touch with one of these scientists, I think Ralph Abraham. And he said 'oh well the way to get in touch with these people is on the Well', which was a San Francisco based bulletin board.

So you know I was on his Mac and we were banging around and I just thought, "wow -- there's five hundred or a thousand people involved in the conversation right now out there, with text." And it was really like a, just like a first psychedelic experience, or a first sexual experience where you go "wow this is a whole world going on that I'd had no idea existed." It was like opening a door to a whole world.

So in a way it was a watershed moment in your own socialisation, the ability to communicate with people in ways that you'd not been able to before.

Oh yeah. Both in a purely social way and in a kind of a hierachical way. Because here I am just out of college, can't raise anyone on the phone, you know through their secretaries and assistants, and anyone who has a "name" is really hard to reach. And online it was as if it was this almost self-selecting community. It was almost like you've made it to the party, you've followed the bizarre map point and gotten all the way to this weird party out in the outback somewhere. Then everyone welcomed you. "Oh you made it, good, come in". I felt like I was part of the sort of Paris underground in World War II, once you find the secret doorway everybody's the same, everybody's equal, and there's just this great party. So you know famous scientists and authors, college students and 14 year-olds all have the same status.

So it liberated some people from I guess traditional social contact. It gave them a new forum. But I'm wondering how it also realised the new potential for a group consciousness as you said before. You really believe that it was possible that online communication could do that. Can you explain to us how you might have perceived that happening?

Well it's strange. There's a moment in a rave where everything kind of clicks and you feel that "wow this isn't just me anymore, I'm part of this great organism, I'm part of this thing that's happening." And that's the sense when there's an online conversation -- and this is all asynchronous conversation where you type something and someone else types something a day later. It's a conversation that happens over weeks or months.

But there was this feeling of a great collective project, and everytime some new person came online it was like another node in the organism lighting up. And things were growing so exponentially it just felt like eventually the whole world would get lit up with these active nodes. Everyone would be participating in one big conversation with lots of little sub threads. And if the whole world's participating in one conversation together then we've essentially hardwired a global brain, with everyone as a neuron participating in this thing.

How has it changed?

Well it changed a number of ways. I think in part we didn't realise exactly what was so special about what we had. The first real instinct that we had online was to preserve what we had by keeping government out. And we did keep government out. No censorship, no regulations. A new public, private sector. But what happened along the way was that the shareware, gift economy we had developed -- this thing that was very apart from business as usual -- was slowly absorbed by business interests. They spent probably 10 years looking at the Internet thinking how are we going to make money off this? How, how, how? And they kept trying different things to determine where the profit was, because if it's just people talking to one another there's no way to make money. You can't make money off someone's conversation except for their online time or the telephone charges.

What they did was they decided they were going to replace the content with their own content. In other words rather than people feeling it's a valuable thing to talk to one another, they're going to put things out there that we have to buy. And the way they were able to do that was with this thing called the World Wide Web, which instead of being a conversation of people typing to one another is this big published set of pages.

Instead of communication, the user experience is going through and reading a page and clicking on something and reading another page and clicking on something else. Marketers watch the way we click through in order to get us to buy stuff. The big new research on the Web and the Internet now is not how to develop any particularly technology -- it's how to track someone's movements in order to draw him into a purchase.

Douglas I'm just wanting to ask you why have we been so able to adapt quickly to technology, to technologies and harness them to our own advantage? I mean what was some of the watershed technologies say in the home which allowed individuals to sort of break down the traditional mass media controls of programming, the mystification of mass media as some sort of all-seeing eye.

I think it's all the little handheld devices actually that were the most powerful. For me, growing up, it was the remote control, which gave me the ability to break up the narrative so that rather than just getting pulled along into some awful coercive story where there's really no way out other than getting up out of the chair and literally flicking the channel. Now, as a defence mechanism I can use the remote control and, with a minimum of effort and without any compunction, just flick away, and jump away and come back later. I can go through the dial and come back 10 minutes later after I've watched a little of the game and watched a little news and watched a couple of rock videos. And I can still see how the story ends, but I'm not as tied up in it.

Then the Sega, the Nintendo joystick also was a tremendously liberating moment. Because the pixel had been something, you know the television pixel right on the screen that only the ABC announcer could really control, this was a holy turf a forbidden zone. And here, with just a flick of my wrist, I can now actually move little SuperMario across the screen. So the television pixel itself, that field of colour because something that I could play with too.

And then finally the computer mouse and the keyboard provided that final moment of liberation where now not only can I move the pixels around but I can communicate through this television screen to other people. So my entire perception of the screen changed from a "read-only" medium to this idea of a portal or a window to all these other people.

And so the mass media which we used to read and watch which was in many ways considered absolute truth was being undermined by our own ability to utilise the same technologies.

Well right, and the funny thing is that you know mass media had always been used to sell us stuff, and they kept selling us things, and selling us things and what they didn't realise is they were actually selling us the tools that would help us deconstruct, demystify and then do our own media.

You gave a talk in Melbourne called 'Futurists Suck', now many people when they hear the word futurist think of 20th century art movements that grew out of Italy, but for you it means something totally different, doesn't it? Can you explain to us what you mean by futurists?

The futurists I mean are the people that are mainly responsible for turning a very populist people's media movement -- the thing we're talking about -- into a weird, wired-business-long-boom-capitalist philosophy. Something that was just immensely fun turned into a stock market movement. And I think that happened because of these futurists. These futurists are the experts, they're the ones who come along to convince businessmen that "oh you better join this thing, you better get on this Internet or your business isn't gonna do well." Futurists to me are people that scare us away from the present.

How do they do it? How do they get inside our consciousness and make us fear being left behind, or not being cool enough, or being too fat, or being too ugly. How do they do that through the Internet?

Well one way is they remystify the media that we've just demystified. Look at Windows 95 or Windows 98 or the World Wide Web. These are very complex interfaces. No one really understands quite how they work anymore. Where in the old days computers were so simple that you could figure out how they worked. Do computers do anything now that they didn't do before? No. But they do it in a more complex way. In order to remystify things, use very complex language that people don't understand. Talk about this "information age" which they call it. It has nothing to do with information, but calling this thing an information age makes it about content and information -- this stuff that you're going to get overloaded with. I've never experienced information overload because I don't need information, I just want contact with other people.

Is it also a case that we live in permanent upgrade anxiety. That we in total fear that our computer is not strong enough, not smart enough, not quick enough, but never using it to its full capacity just to communicate.

Well yeah. Part of that fear is generated by the companies. Imagine if a car company not only controlled the cars, but controlled the roads. So they sell a certain car one day and they change the way the roads are made so that you need a different car in order to go on it. Well that's between Microsoft and Intel and certain Internet companies. That's really the plan. They change the way the Internet works so that you need a new system in order to get on it, and then they make a bigger chip so then you need a different operating system and then a bigger operating system so you need a different chip. So that this sense of feeling compelled to upgrade is really programmed right into the software and the hardware.

We're basically in the age of being on the superhighway of planned obsolescence aren't we?

Oh yeah. And planned obsolescence that's now gone beyond mere physical objects, and is literally programmed into our culture and then programmed into our sensibility. That's why all these high-tech magazines have this fetishistic sense: you know you need the next thing, you need the newest gizmo and if you don't have it your business will fail and you won't succeed, and you won't be sexy, and you won't be cool. And this is not true.

I'm wondering how we're going to stop the Internet becoming simply a global mall, the biggest shopping mall in the world.

It's going to be very tricky. The reason I'm here even talking about it is because I think the easiest solution is for us -- those of us who have experienced something better than a global shopping mall -- is to look back and think "well what *was* it we experienced?" Then, we should try to promote those values online or in culture itself. What I experienced back then was a sense of co-operation. I experienced communitarinism really for the first time in my life. Having grown up in a very suburban, competitive atmosphere, I experienced an alternative. And to me that was very very liberating. And now that I see essentially a form of hyper-free-market capitalism taking over, I'm watching a shareware universe turn into a competitive universe. Where everyone online is an individual competing for one anothers' money.

What I think we need to do is just promote ideas and values other than the dollar. So the dollar is part of what motivates people, ok that's fine, just as sex is part of what motivates me at a party, -- you know trying to find a girl, trying to get laid whatever. But luckily I'm not so keyed in on just finding a sex partner that I can't talk with some guys and have a good time or listen to the music.

Is that different to your idea of opting out of the more conventional political process was in a way not apathy, but withdrawing in disgust and in itself a political act? Are you asking people to buy back in to try and change things?

In a way I am, yeah. Because I think creating and maintaining a counter-culture is actually counter-cultural. And I'm trying to be pro-cultural, and realise that in a sense we have to integrate. Because the over-culture is so big and so powerful that whenever we do something that's positively counter-cultural, they grab it and co-opt it and make it part of the evil machine.

So grunge became a marketing tool. What started out in Seattle as a musical movement which was anti-MTV became MTV.

Right, which is why I think the man killed himself. You know, Kurt Cobain died, he couldn't maintain what it was he thought he was doing. And just as they incorporated that, they'll incorporate rave, they'll incorporate everything we do. So I think the idea's rather than wondering, "how are we going to resist being incorporated?", instead, instill what we're doing with such corrosive powerful, acidic, acerbic and positive "memes," if you will, or ideologies, that when it gets absorbed it destroys the system.

You also wrote a lot in the past about a generational standoff of sorts between the so-called gen-xers and the baby boomers. Do you think there's been any shift in the relationship between the two generations?

Yeah to some extent. I mean in the States people still consider generation-x to be people in their twenties. If they've been doing that for ten years then where did generation-x go?

Generation-next I guess they call them now.

Yeah. The real generation-x got absolutely lost. The real generation-x are people in their 30s, and they were never recognised as the actual generation-x. They were people who just were at the tail end of the baby boom and realised that all these riches and real estate and things that the baby boom got weren't around by the time that we got out of college or wherever.

And we had to suffer, as people do now, through AIDS instead of free sex, and "just say no to drugs" instead of the psychedelic movement. So I think that this generation-x has passed. If we want to talk about the generational inequity and strife between young people and older people, that's abated in some sense. I see, in the States anyway, how marketers developed new marketing strategies that have brought young people into the fold. In other words we maybe developed a certain kind of apathy and ironic distance from media, but then they just create commercials that appeal to that sense of irony and that sense of distance. It's what I call "wink advertising." Where they just make it very confusing and you actually are tense because you're trying to figure out "well what is the joke here, how does this work?"

Don't want to miss out on it.

Right. So they create commercials for the media savvy generation by making these media savvy jokes.

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